Triple-step control of Vehicle Platooning

Basing on the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) technology, vehicle platooning has different strengths in different scenarios. For truck transportation scenarios, the purpose of platooning is to save energy; for urban congestion intersections, increasing the throughput of the congestion intersection is the principal purpose, that is, to pass more vehicles in the shortest possible time with safety distance. Taking the truck transport platooning and urban congested intersection platooning scenarios into account, this paper applies a triple-step method to guarantee the safety distance between the trucks and the vehicles. Firstly, the detailed dynamic model is established, then, for different scenarios, the control-oriented models are obtained by simplifying the detailed model in different and reasonable ways. Eventually, the proposed control method is validated through the simulation results under two working scenarios. Simulation results show that by using triple-step control method, the settling time is 50ms and the steady error is within 20cm in truck platooning model, 100ms and within 10cm in congested intersection platooning model, which are hardly achieved by traditional control method. The proposed control method has great potential for practical use for its simplicity and precision.